Brain test could be next polygraph

Seattle scientist making his pitch

Published 10:00 pm, Sunday, September 14, 2008

Seattle neuroscientist Larry Farwell administers the brain wave test that he developed to Karen Judy.

Seattle neuroscientist Larry Farwell administers the brain wave test that he developed to Karen Judy.

Photo: Paul Joseph Brown/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Brain test could be next polygraph

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A Seattle scientist who has developed an electronic brain test that he says could improve our ability to force criminals to reveal themselves, identify potential terrorists and free those wrongly convicted may have finally broken through the bureaucratic barriers that he believes have served to stifle adoption of the pioneering technique.

"There seems to be a renewed surge of interest in this by the intelligence agencies and the military," said Larry Farwell, neuroscientist and founder of Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories based at the Seattle Science Foundation.

Contrary to the Hollywood image of law enforcement always employing the latest science to track down the bad guys, Farwell's years of struggle suggest that law enforcement and intelligence agencies are just about as reluctant to change as any other entrenched government bureaucracy.

"There is always this ignorance, inertia and active resistance by those who benefit from the status quo," Farwell said.

The technique he calls "brain fingerprinting" is an electronic test of a specific kind of brain wave that he says can identify incriminating information despite an individual's attempt to conceal the knowledge.

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"The lack of acceptance has been more about turf than science," said Drew Richardson, a former top anti-terrorism investigator with the FBI in Virginia who teaches forensic science and also consults with Farwell. "If this had just been about the science, I think this technique would have advanced much more quickly."

Law enforcement and other investigatory agencies still routinely use the standard lie detector "polygraph" stress test today even though most scientific organizations (including the National Academy of Sciences) have found the polygraph to be highly unreliable -- a finding that makes it legally inadmissible in court.

The disturbing news that some in the military and intelligence community have resorted to waterboarding or other forms of "physical" interrogation of prisoners appears to have provided a potential breakthrough for brain fingerprinting.

"Torture, or doing the kind of things that approach torture, might get someone to say what you want them to say but it's been shown time and again that it is not a good way to get accurate or reliable information," Farwell said.

The Seattle native, son of a University of Washington physics professor, added that he personally regards such methods as a fundamental violation of human rights.

On Monday, Farwell and Richardson will be in Washington, D.C., to make a concerted pitch for brain fingerprinting as one of five semi-finalists in an international contest known as the Global Security Challenge. It is co-sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security, and the prize is $500,000 plus more support from venture capital firms. Winners of the U.S. competition will head to London in November for the final contest.

"We've already done some testing with experts in national security and showed, for example, that we could accurately identify people who were FBI agents from experts in bomb-making," Farwell.

He said he couldn't go into too much detail but that military officials and others in federal government have shown interest lately in seeing if the technique could be used to identify those making the improvised bombs in Iraq that are used against soldiers.

"It's all based on well-established science," Farwell said. Trained as an undergraduate at Harvard University and as a graduate student at the University of Illinois, he initially pursued studies in cognitive science and in the 1990s worked on one of the first demonstrations of brain-computer interaction.

As part of this research, Farwell ran across what would become the scientific basis of brain fingerprinting. It is a type of signal in the brain known as a P300 wave, so-called because it is an involuntary response to a recognized object or piece of information that happens within 300 milliseconds.

It's been a well-known and widely accepted phenomenon within neuroscience. What Farwell did is connect it with another related electrical brain response that he dubbed a MerMer (for "memory and encoding related multifaceted electroencephalographic response") that he contends provides a foolproof method for testing an individual's knowledge -- or lack of knowledge -- of a criminal act.

"It's 100 percent reliable and has been ruled admissible in court," Farwell said.

That was in Iowa, during a court case in which a man, Terry Harrington, was found innocent of murder and in 2003 released after spending 24 years in prison. Brain fingerprinting played a role, Farwell emphasized, but was not the only reason for Harrington's exoneration. And in another case, that of Jimmy Ray Slaughter in Oklahoma, Farwell's brain fingerprint finding that Slaughter was likely innocent did not persuade the court or prevent his execution.

"There is still a lot of resistance to accepting this in law enforcement," Farwell said.

Richardson said he sees brain fingerprinting as being viewed by the courts and many in law enforcement as where DNA fingerprinting was back in the 1980s -- exotic, not fully proved legally and too complicated for regular use. Today, he said, DNA testing is considered fairly routine and hardly even that high tech.

"Similarly, we're just in the early phases of brain fingerprinting," Richardson said. But he agreed with Farwell that a confluence of events seems likely to speed up adoption of the technique.

The recent suicide of Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins, subsequently identified by the FBI as the lead suspect in the 2001 anthrax poisonings, is another example of a case in which brain fingerprinting could have helped either confirm the FBI's suspicions or perhaps exonerate Ivins, Richardson said.

"My understanding is that they did polygraph testing and Ivins passed them," he noted. Unlike the indirect and unreliable nature of polygraph testing, Richardson said, brain fingerprinting can directly identify if a subject is aware of incriminating knowledge or information.

"We've proven this can work and is based on science," Farwell said. Now, he added, all they need is to see if they can get the bureaucracy to budge a bit. "That part has taken a lot longer than I would have expected."